1. A new theme that is open, clean, and easy to maintain (the last one more important to me)
2. Use of Web Fonts for better typography control
3. A home page that displays a featured gallery in a slide show and the last five posts identified with their thumbnail images in the middle of the home page
4. Simple and unobtrusive menu, infrequently used options being placed in sub-menus
5. Family photographs are separated to a sub menu under “About”, few posts may fit both family and other photography categories and they appear under both groups of posts
6. A better structured gallery page that presents cohesive collections with its own layout
7. An exhibitions page, designed similar to the galleries, that presents exhibit information along with all the photographs in each exhibit. There may be some overlap in the presented photographs but that is due to an effort to keep the exhibit collections complete
8. A modest store where published magazines, folios, and soon photographs, can be purchased
9. Higher quality video files for slide shows, most can be viewed in HD format and quality. Look for the blue HD on the player control bar and click on it after the video starts
10. Special back-end technologies to speed up site performance

Let me know what you think, please share your thoughts by posting a comment.

My initial attempts generated an error message and the process aborted. After reporting the problem, their programmers ironed out the problems, well, most of the important ones, and I was able to create several “books” in digital format. The process is fairly straight forward and I have produced several volumes of test output and you will find a link to a sample at the end of this article:

1. Point your browser to feedfabrik.com and choose the book option, BookFabrik. They also offer a poster service which did not interest me and I have not tried it.
2. Choose the correct platform, Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Tumbler
3. Provide your access ID and password to make sure others cannot create a book using your content. They promise not to keep the login information after the current session.
4. Click on “Create my Book” button

The system logs into your blog and extracts blog contents, images (there are some snags) from each post excluding the headers, sidebars, menus, and other content that has a place on the Web but not in print. Depending on the size of the blog this may take a while, be patient. You will be presented with a progress bar which stands still for some time before showing the percentage of work completed. This is the most time-consuming part and it can be 5-7 minutes or more.

As you see, after the wait is over you will see the preview of your book and flip through the pages. The control block on the left allows to modify the date range, chronological order or reverse, the cover design, and several layout options. If any of these options are changed after the initial creation of the book a warning message alerts the user for recreating the book with the new options.

In general, the process works well. The obvious shortcomings are the exclusion of video and audio content, although technically it may be possible to embed them in the digital PDF copy. Other than these, there are several issues that I have reported to FeedFabrik and they informed me that they were working on them. These are the nits to pick:

1. Ability to choose post categories to include, this is a must-have for me. It will allow creating content related to a narrow subject
2. Page content is entirely omitted, which may be fine for most circumstances but it will be nice to be able to include selected page content.
3. Their formatting treats a heading (H2-H6) after the first one (H1) like ordinary text. This causes the article to lose its entire structure and reading becomes difficult
4. Some images are omitted if there is only a text link to them rather than an image thumbnail
5. Tabular data presented in tables are not handled well at all and they indicated that was intentional since table-based old layouts can be extremely difficult to render. I found a workaround and did a screen capture of the table part of one post and inserted it as an image
6. Some widow and orphan control is erratic and I had a heading separated from the paragraph that followed. The support person indicated that they normally pay attention to widow and orphan controls, those single line of a paragraph left on the previous page or the single last line of a paragraph that spill to the next page
7. Some small images are treated as any other and presented on a separate line, a minor issue for sure
8. I would like to control the font size and justification of paragraph content. Currently all content is full-justified. On an automated system like this it is difficult to properly justify both left and right edges of paragraphs and when not done right there could be gaping spaces between words. I would much prefer the have left-justified text than those artificial gaps
9. Their WordPress plugin, which will remove the need to provide login information on their site, is not working reliably, it will be a welcome feature and eliminate the security concerns many will have, as I had initially

I think this service will be well utilized. It will allow me to create small PDF or printed books of some related content to offer in my small store. That said, for a large blog content the cost of a big book quickly climbs. I created a single book containing all the posts; it was over 1,000 pages and the printed version would cost me about $75. On the other hand, the PDF copies are very reasonably priced at 2.99 Euros. There is the option of getting a free PDF preview which includes all trim marks. They can be removed easily in Acrobat, but I encourage anyone interested in using this service to spring for the paid version of the PDF copy to support an excellent service.

For your patience for reading this far, here is a PDF copy of Kept Light 2011.

Take a look at FeedFabrik, you may actually like it. I did!

This practice disappointed me. WordPress.org and its founder Matt have been the promoters of open-source code under the GPL, and stood on the side of openness and transparency. The inclusion of Quantcast script, which collects traffic information and accumulates it on Quantcast databases, with no disclosure to the users both surprised and disappointed me. What was even more disappointing was Matt’s nonchalant response “…turn off the stats plugin? :)” (his smiley)

There is a noticeable slowdown despite Matt’s claim to the contrary, I validated this on several sites I manage and all showed visible performance increase without the WordPress.com Stats plugin. Needless to say, i disabled and deleted the plugin on this site as well as several others. There are quite a few other options that provide the same or even better data. Until WordPress.com and Matt come clean on this issue, I will not use this plugin nor will I recommend it to my clients.

My recommendation to you, the reader, if you use self-hosted WordPress you should test this on your site and then decide based on performance issues as well as ethical dimensions. I learned a lesson, even the most trustworthy appearing organizations and individuals may unexpectedly behave in unexpected ways. Caveat emptor!

One such tool is a toolbar from Wibiya.com which I installed after starting an account with them. After exploring its features, I decided that it did not offer me any value and asked their tech support to remove my information. I wish all these companies added a simple feature “Delete my account”, upon clicking it would delete all the information I provided. I have been trying to get my name and e-mail removed from their system for the last 3 days, for some bizarre reason these Web companies latch on to your information with octopus tentacles and would not let go. All they succeed in getting in return is strong negative feeling, at least from me. I will not use their services, nor will I recommend them to any of my clients. These companies need to understand the value of treating the customer right and with respect. Only then, will they have a chance of building loyalty not by holding on to my information with an iron grip.

If you are interested in adding a toolbar to your WordPress site, I suggest that you look elsewhere and contact them before signing up to find out if they will remove your information on demand.

Stay away from Wibiya!

On some occasions, especially on sites that I build for others, I want to add a title to the displayed image for added information. This stumped me for a while as there are no check-boxes or other configuration options in either NGG or HS. A little investigation and reading lead me to the solution of adding the following lines to the HighSlide code into the WS-Higslide configuration script:

hs.show_caption=”y”;
hs.captionEval = “this.thumb.title”;  (this will display the contents of the “Title” field in NGG)

or:
hs.captionEval = “this.a.title”;  (this will display the contents of the “Caption” field in NGG)

I hope this helps others who may be trying to do the same.